Doc survey results

A few weeks ago I put up a quick survey about Drupal docs. It was very "by-the-seat-of-my-pants" but I just wanted to start getting a feel for where people are coming from and give the community an opportunity to talk about docs. It wasn't scientific and it wasn't even a "good" survey. I am definitely not a survey expert. Luckily some folks have volunteered to help me make future surveys better, but I'm still happy with what I learned from this one. I wanted to share some basic stuff that I found interesting from the responses. I don't have a lot of time to tinker with stats and such and I've also attached the results in a CSV file so anyone else that wants to play with them, can have fun. Big thanks to all who filled it out! We had 228 responses. My main interest in this survey was to read what people would say about docs when given an anonymous text box and how people think of Drupal docs. OK, so anyway, here are the goods....

As a reminder, here are the 5 questions:
1. How long have you been using Drupal?
2. Are you a member of the Drupal documentation team?
3. Do you feel that you have the skills or meet the requirements to help with Drupal documentation? If not, please explain what skills or requirements you feel are needed.
4. In what ways have you contributed to Drupal documentation?
- Edited existing documentation on Drupal.org
- Wrote new handbook page(s) on Drupal.org
- Wrote or edited help text in Drupal core
- Provided a patch for API documentation (api.drupal.org)
- Created an issue in the Documentation issue queue
- Participated in a Drupal documentation meeting or sprint
- Participated in a documentation mailing list discussion
- Created documentation made available on a site other than the Drupal.org sites
- I have not contributed to Drupal documentation
- Other (with room to explain)
5. Please feel free to share any thoughts you have about about the Drupal documentation team and the maintenance of Drupal documentation.

Things that stuck out to me

Real quickly before I head into a few, brief points, I should note that this survey wasn't widely broadcasted. I posted to the g.d.o front page and spread the word on Twitter. Since it was not a well-planned survey I didn't feel like I should do a front post on Drupal.org. I plan for future surveys to be more thought out and get wider exposure. Just over half the responses were from people with over 2 years of Drupal experience, so the numbers may look a bit lopsided. That said, I found it interesting that just because people have been around for a while does not necessarily mean that they have any better grasp on what the doc team is about or how they can get involved.

It is no surprise that people who are newer to Drupal don't feel as qualified to help with documentation. I think many of us know this anyway, but this is a major assumption that I want to change this year. New users are a critical piece to good documentation and we need to encourage more people to engage sooner, before they get "Drupalized."

Aside from folks not feeling that they know Drupal "well enough," other common blockers for folks were language or time. Again, not terribly surprising but areas I'd like to chip away at as well. There were definitely a lot of responses where people want to help but can't see a clear, simple way to get started, or something that doesn't end up consuming too much time. Coming up with more straight-forward directions for helping with docs is a high priority for me right now and I hope that the doc sprints I am attending, chatting with all sorts of people about docs, will help clarify this.

Another interesting thing was that percentage-wise there was a roughly consitent number of folks across all experience levels who weren't sure if they were on the doc team or not. Since we opened the handbook last year, we have been trying to redefine what the "doc team" means and I dare say we aren't doing a horribly good job right now. The general idea is that there is no special team you need to join with fancy site permissions to be on the team. One thing that has done though, I think, is maybe blurred it so much that people aren't really sure where lines of authority or access are.

So, these are some quick thoughts but I invite everyone to look through the results themselves and continue this conversation. I did a few basic charts, which may or may not be useful (but they look perrrty ;-)). There are two CSV files attached as well, results-doc-survey.csv is the raw data from the survey site, and basic-stats.csv were the little mini tables I used to make the pie charts. (Note that I did redact some personal info to maintain anonymity.) You should be able to open the CSV files in most any spreadsheet software, like Excel, Numbers, or OOo Calc.